Harry Reid's announcement that he will not stand for reelection to the Senate from Nevada in 2016 is a major loss for the climate movement -- and yet another signal that the U.S. Senate is being transformed by today's bifurcated, parliamentary politics into an institution almost unrecognizably different from its traditions.

Despite experts agreeing that killing the cormorants is wrong and won't work, it turns out that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to kill nearly 11,000 cormorants and destroy more than 26,000 of their nests to try to reduce cormorant numbers by more than half.

Corporate interests that spend hundreds of millions a year on state and federal lobbying have grown accustomed to getting what they want at the federal and state levels, but it is much harder to assert corporate control over America's 22,553 municipal and county governments.

Before we say goodbye to winter let's remember the good times, the wonders that only weeks upon weeks of freezing temperatures can bring us. Let's pay tribute to one of the most visited natural spectacles in North America, and the beauty of its frozen sculptural white.

Anyone riding mass transit in the New York region this past winter has seen the stress that this old system is under. Delayed trains, decaying stations, and more crowded cars are increasingly common. There is little question that the system needs a cash infusion for long-term capital improvements and short-term operation and maintenance.

Over time, we can expect institutions that divest from fossil fuels to face additional pressure, not less pressure, to reduce their electricity consumption from fossil fuels, and to direct their research efforts toward non-fossil energy sources.

In a Park Service compendium published in mid-March, officials wrote that the transmission of disease from llamas or alpacas to wild sheep or mountain goats has not been documented, and the likelihood is "probably low, although still possible."

Pebble and its Beltway-based CEO announced this week the hiring of two Washington, D.C. consulting firms to "conduct an independent review" of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ("EPA") work on the proposed mine.

To save lives, and to begin to satisfy the city's dire water infrastructure needs, Detroit needs to expand the current assistance programs and enact the Water Affordability Plan (WAP) approved by the City Council in 2006.

The Harvard position, examined through the lens of John Donne's insight, is indefensible. It is Janus-faced and cynically hypocritical. The University accepts the science of climate change and the catastrophes that scientists (including Harvard scholars) foresee if radical changes in energy usage are not made.

Given that the contaminated aquifers scandal broke just before news that California may have just one year of water left in its existing reservoirs, Gov. Brown's silence on the call for an emergency moratorium on fracking is especially alarming.

In the end, Safer Streets, Stronger Economies is less a scientific study than a compilation of available (and, to a great extent, differing) data from a limited range of case studies. To my mind, it is far from conclusive.

To win in 2016, the party's leaders should recognize what regular people already know. Polling finds overwhelming support for the wind production tax credit, including 63 percent of registered Republicans. It's time for the Republican presidential field to see that swing state voters want their energy clean, and they want it made at home.

The fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is approaching, but in the intervening years since the well blowout deep offshore, oil and gas drillers have pushed even deeper and even farther afield.